Performance of the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB was compared to the 512MB GeForce 7900 GTX, which debuted in March, 2006 at a price that ranged from $499 to $500. Production of the GeForce 7900 GTX was discontinued when it was replaced by the GeForce 7950 GT, which is also equiped with 512MB and currently sells in the $250-$275 price range.

Specifications Comparison

Note that the GeForce 7950 GT is essentially a GeForce 7900 GTX with lower core (550MHz) and memory (700MHz) clock speeds and 44.8GB/sec of memory bandwidth.

The test system remains unchanged since its last review, which was of the MSI GeForce 8800 GTX in a mixed-vendor SLI configuration.

GeForce 7900 GTX

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• Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 - 2.66GHz Conroe Core - 4MB L2 Cache
• EVGA nForce 680i SLI Motherboard
• 2GB Corsair CM2X1024-8500C5 XMS PC8500 DDR2 SDRAM 5-5-5-18-2T @ 400MHz
• Western Digital Raptor 74GB HDD, 10000RPM, 4.5ms Avg Seek, 8MB Buffer, SATA
• Seagate Barracuda 300GB HDD, 7200RPM, 8ms Avg Seek, 8MB Buffer, SATA 2
• Western Digital Caviar SE16 250GB HDD, 7200RPM, 8.9ms Avg Seek, 16MB Buffer, SATA 2
• Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZX
• PC Power and Cooling Turbo-Cool 1KW-SR Power Supply
• Dell 3007WFP LCD Monitor
• 32-Bit Color / Vsync Disabled / 60Hz Refresh Rate
• Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 / DirectX 9.0c

GeForce 7950 GTX

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Graphics Cards, Drivers, and Settings

• GeForce 7900 GTX - 650MHz Core/1600MHz Memory (Effective)
• EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB - 575MHhz Core / 1700MHz Memory (Effective)
• ForceWare 93.71 and 97.92
• High Quality Texture Filtering, 8x Anisotropic Filtering, Gamma Correct Antialiasing

Test Applications

• Dark Messiah - v1.02
• Doom 3 - v1.3.1
• Far Cry - v1.04
• F.E.A.R. - v1.08

Notes

• Antialiasing was set to "application-controlled" unless otherwise noted.
• Anisotropic filtering was set to "application-controlled" unless otherwise noted.
• Supersampling transparency antialiasing was always enabled unless otherwise noted.

Under certain conditions, the amount of graphics memory utilized will infleuence performance. This measurement was provided courtesy of the freeware utility VidMemWatcher. The screenshot below shows the amount of video memory used on the GeForce 7900 GTX when running Dark Messiah at a resolution of 1600x1200 with 4x AA. The memory usage that is being reported in this review was the value that appeared after a benchmark was completed on the GeForce 7900 GTX.

Video Memory Watcher

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Note that RivaTuner also has the ability to monitory video memory usage via the hardware monitoring VidMem.dll plugin. The screenshot below shows the amount of video memory used on the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB when running Dark Messiah at a resolution of 1600x1200 with 4x AA.

RivaTuner Hardware Monitoring

Next Page: F.E.A.R. Performance